What’s it like to be in a company that goes from 13 people to 750 people in 5 years? Why would anyone run a business that loses money on purpose? How do you manage customers who were oversold and are now disappointed in your product? These are some of the question I ask customer success and SaaS veteran Nigel Hammond, co-founder of Foresight, a B2B SaaS application focused on helping SaaS companies deliver on the last mile of customer success. Nigel started in sales and moved to customer success at DealCloud, a financial services software provider. Nigel talks about how having a great product isn’t enough to drive adoption, how enterprise customers want to learn best practices, how he writes effective assessments that uncover customers who’re likely to cancel their subscriptions, and why it's appropriate for him run his business at a loss for now, on this episode of the Fortune’s Path podcast.
Nigel tells Tom about his company Foresight and how it helps other B2B SaaS companies make their customers successful. Nigel didn't set out to be an entrepreneur. He worked at DealCloud with his co-founder when DealCloud went from series A through acquisition and finally to IPO. Nigel worked in sales there but found that unfulfilling. He moved to account management and focused on giving clients more value so they would be more likely to renew, tolerate price increases, and buy additional products. While in customer success Nigel discovered a problem that had no solution and then left to create a company to build that product. One thing that drove Nigel to start his own thing was the fun he had in a small company. Instead of leaving DealCloud to go through the same process of series A to IPO, his partner convinced him to create their own company to create Foresight to address churn in SaaS. Nigel talks about how enterprise SaaS is based on managing individual accounts and how that process can be very manual. Nigel tells how account management is often reactive and fire fighting rather than pro-active and strategic. Nigel's a-ha moment came after making a presentation to a large customer who loved his software but wanted to get best practices. Nigel is able to get good response rates on assessments because they come as part of another process like a sales meeting that's already scheduled or a renewal that's coming up. Tom and Nigel talk about how a tech business can start as a services business, but Foresight was not one of those, and that's why he needed front end investment to get his business going. Tom and Nigel talk about the differences between building a business that sells a dream and a business that delivers obvious value from the start. Finally Nigel tells Tom what he plans to do with the money from his next round, which he is in the final stages of closing.